Carolyn Coad’s marketing career began when she was still just a teenager, overseeing promotions for the Bell Media-owned radio station KOOL FM in her hometown of Kitchener, Ont.
But, it was an internship with the Waterloo tech company iAnywhere (subsequently absorbed by global enterprise software company SAP) during her first year at the University of Waterloo that would become the signpost for Coad’s post-academic career.
“Being in that environment is contagious,” says Coad, who was named the University of Waterloo’s 2006 arts co-op student of the year for her work with the company (a feat she repeated the next year while interning at Microsoft).
“If you’d asked me in high school if I thought I was going to work in the tech industry, I would say ‘It sounds really cool, but what would I do there?,’” she says today. “If I hadn’t had that access or the internships I had, I probably would have worked for a packaged goods company or a car company.”
Less than a decade later, Coad is a fast-rising star on SAP’s global product marketing team. A self-described “data head,” she has successfully combined her love of numbers with an ability to tell stories that engage customers.
Denise Broady, chief operating officer for SAP global industry cloud in New York, calls Coad a “talented up-and-coming individual,” and says she hopes to one day see her leading the company’s marketing or communications division.
“Her unique skill is not that she’s an amazing marketer, but she’s also very strong on the communications front,” says Broady. “SAP doesn’t have that function, and she’s managed to figure out how to create that as part of her role and what she’s doing on the product marketing front.”
Coad, 28, joined SAP’s global product marketing team as a manager in 2012, and has quickly risen through the ranks – to senior manager in 2013 and director in 2014. In March, she began leading global product marketing for the company’s flagship product, the next generation business suite S/4HANA. Broady says its the fastest-growing new product in company history.
Coad’s purview includes content strategy and creation including messaging and positioning, as well as SAP generated and third-party sponsored marketing assets and tools used by the company’s worldwide sales and marketing teams.
She also leads the internship/co-operative learning program for her team, managing and mentoring up to three students in different worldwide locations, and is a volunteer ambassador for SAP Canada, leading the company-sponsored junior achievement program – coaching 30 high school students to launch, run and liquidate their own organization.
She has also co-authored two editions of the SAP-presented book Enterprise Mobility for Dummies, and been nominated for the company’s Hasso Plattner Award for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for the launch of the internal innovation project “Boardroom Redefined.”
Her global role means that Coad frequently travels to Silicon Valley and SAP offices throughout the Middle East and Europe, while maintaining a base in Toronto. “Time zones are something I live with every day, but it’s so invigorating and motivating to see how you can [work] on such a broad global scale,” she says.
